Last September the famed (in New England, at least) Hood blimp crash landed in the appropriately named Massachusetts town Manchester-by-the-sea. After the crash the dairy company placed an ad thanking the residents of the town for their patience and cooperation during the blimp's clean up. Either out of sentiment or true adoration, the ad, created by VIA, was handed The International Dairy Foods Association's "Best Overall" award in the print ad category at the organization's Smart Marketing 2007 conference held last month in Las Vegas. Did that blimp really crash or was that planned all along? OK. Just kidding.

VIA also won a Best Radio Ad for their Hood holiday eggnog spots and a Best Public Relations Campaign award or its press conference with Boston Red Sox star Coco Crisp as well as an award in the "Best Promotion" category for their Sox Tops for Kids program.

Rethink, Canada put together these clever little ads on behalf of Play Land. In addition to lending new perspective on mundane everyday stuff, the series reminds us of what it was like to be so small that you actually crawl into household items and pretend you were airborne.

Wow, people are getting way into this reverse psychology thing. We have faith that the method is likely to work for gamblers if it works for anybody, considering they have lots of practice playing the contrarian with irate bill-paying spouses.

Former gambler Hoyt Monroe gets tapped by Pala Casino, Spa and Resort in Southern California to serve as manchild - er, poster boy for a counterintuitive series of casino ads.

The campaign site is called How Not to Win and when you click on casino games you get an earful of Hoyt suggesting what you should do instead, like hitting the supper table instead of the blackjack table, woo-hoo!, that kind of stuff.

If for some reason you're inclined, catch more Hoyt on Youtube. M&C Saatchi, Los Angeles are guilty for this one.

The fembot vodka icons of Svedka are back with a politically provocative slogan: "Make cocktails, not war."

Wish our presidents thought that way. Well, maybe this one does. The Svedka campaign is probably just a thinly-veiled attempt to get us all to warm to the idea of robot rule before, after a short-lived golden age meant mainly to ease the transition, they all kill us for the sake of efficiency.

It's all just like Flight of the Conchords said it would be - except they failed to mention a critical component of our overtaking would be the T and A factor of said robots.

We don't really know what to think about this banner ad for Portrait Professionals but every time we see it we're gripped with a sense of alarm. The girl at left doesn't look bad now, but you have to experience the ad by accident to achieve the full effect.

The before image flashes frenetically - maliciously, even - and is replaced by the after one, but not until after having destroyed an otherwise soothing browsing experience.

Plus, there's something unsettlingly Dorian Gray about taking a mildly menacing photo and replacing it with a timid, disarming one. Suddenly we distrust all our hard-earned social networking friends.

If you want to see the dedication the English have towards their football clubs, you need not look any further than these Mother-created videos which portray the various chairmen of several football clubs behaving oddly such as donning sumo suits, pushing pudding across a field by nose, getting tattoos and enduring chest hair removal. They're weird in the English way which, to some, makes them good. Oh, it's all part of Coke's buy a player campaign.

It had to happen and who better to do it than Axe. We're sure you're familiar with Alex Tew's Million Dollar Homepage phenomenon that actually did make a million and with the thousands of other copycats that made nothing close. Now, Axe has done what it does best: find a way to work a scantily-clad babe into everypieceofmarketingtheydowith their own million dollar homepage-ish effort. While we think Smash My Viper did a similar thing better with their own collection of scantily-clad babes, this Axe effort has extended itself to answering machine foolery and a video in which a Portuguese Brazilian model strips on webcam. This being YouTube, and not Dailymotion, she, of course, does not strip all the way down to nothing. No matter, the 15 year olds will love this one.

Pardon this commercial break. Here's the way we see it. Those who like to tout "people kill people, not guns" are idiotic morons. While they might think they're mildly correct in some twisted fashion, no one can argue the fact that if it were illegal for citizens to carry guns, gun-related deaths in America would plummet. Those who think the Constitution gives Americans the "right to bear arms" are imbeciles stuck in the 1700's. Yes, we needed guns then. No, we don't need them now. It's as simple as that.

The rest of the world thinks we Americans have our screws completely loose on this one and they are right. Columbine. Virginia Tech. Neither would ever have happened had there been stricter gun control laws in place. Fuck the NRA and all their bullshit. Fuck the idiots that let the ban on semi-automatic weapons lapse.